Stripping Down
by mosylu
Summary: Trying to understand an unsub's thought processes, Emily and Reid push professional boundaries.


(A/N) File this one under, "My god, this woman is a sick monkey." No actual sex, but it's M anyway, because, duh, necrophilia. Basically, the point of this story was to learn if I could skeeze you out and turn you on at the same time. Let me know how I did. Established relationship.

Stripping Down

At times, Emily didn't think she would ever forgive Hotch for making them promise to keep it entirely professional on cases. Generally, those times were at the end of the day, when she was zinging with the kind of adrenaline that Spencer Reid was so adept at releasing, or when she was tired and unhappy and just wanted to sleep with his arms around her.

Mostly, however, she understood the wisdom of this promise. Hotch was taking a hell of a risk keeping them together on the team, knowing that they left work and went home to each other. She had no idea what string he or Rossi had yanked with Strauss to keep her artfully powdered nose out of it. But it must be the size of a towline on the _Titanic._

She and Reid did push the boundaries a bit. Not much. It wasn't unknown for any of the team to visit any other of the team's rooms to talk about a theory after they'd been officially sent off the clock. It wasn't like you could stop thinking about this. Plus she hadn't exactly stripped naked, jumped onto the bed, and straddled him.

Instead, she sat in one of the armchairs in his hotel room, still wearing the pants and shirt she'd been in all day. She had kicked her shoes off, but that was because she had her feet stretched out and propped on the second chair as she studied coroner's reports.

He wasn't on the bed either, but roaming the room in a meandering cross-country course of his own design, hands fluttering as he talked. She considered his hands, considered the knots all over her back, and sighed. Professional, she told herself.

Due to bad weather getting out of DC, they'd gotten into Duluth so late that Hotch just checked in with the police and sent everyone to their hotel rooms with the reports. They'd talked it to death - ha, ha - on the plane, but Emily just couldn't stop butting her head against it. Some kind of bad habit, she was sure. Or Reid rubbing off on her. He couldn't let it go either.

"It's clearly a form of necrophilia. He masturbated onto the corpses."

"No penetration, though," Emily noted.

"Not unusual. He'll have poor self-esteem, particularly in romantic situations. Sixty-eight percent of necrophiliacs are motivated by the desire for a partner who won't reject them."

It was nothing they hadn't said already. Sitting on the tarmac for two hours gave you plenty of time to theorize. "Yeah, okay, hot stuff. It's the flaying I don't get," she said.

"True. Removing someone's entire epidermis seems a bit much for forensic countermeasures," he said.

"Ya think?" She read the coroner's report on the two latest victims again again. The cuts indicated some measure of medical training, which would help Garcia narrow things down, but first they had to get a profile for the kind of person who would kill and dump five people, then kill, skin, and dump two more.

"Why did he start flaying them?" Reid asked.

"It's escalation," Emily said. "What was he seeking that he wasn't getting from the other victims?"

"Or that he'd ceased to obtain."

Emily grunted.

Reid wandered over to the thermostat and studied it, stretching his arms over his head in a way that pulled the fabric of his shirt taut against his back. He'd started swimming recently, at the behest of his physical therapist and to a chorus of doom from the team, who were sure he was going to drown himself. He hadn't. She wasn't sure what it was doing for his mostly-recovered knee, but it had done wonderful things for his shoulders and back, which had not been entirely shabby to begin with. He'd never be as muscle-bound as Morgan, but Emily found that she now preferred sleek length over heavy bulge.

". . . was discarded, so we can be sure that wasn't his primary objective," he was saying.

"Uh-huh," she said, running her eyes down the length of his spine. Since she'd seen him naked, she could picture his shoulders and his back and his rear without the clothing in between, the muscles shifting subtly under his smooth skin -

She frowned.

"It could be a form of sadism," he said. "If they were flayed ante mortem. But they weren't."

"Sounds plausible," she said distantly, getting to her feet.

He turned to find her a few inches away. "Emily?"

"Shhh," she said, laying her fingers lightly on his shoulders. Through the cloth of his shirt, muscles and tendons shifted as he dropped his arms. "Thinking."

"Um," he said.

"Ever been to a strip club, Reid?"

"Well - yes. Don't you remember that one time - "

She slid her hands up to cup his shoulders, then ran them down his arms, feeling the subtle swell and dip of deltoid and bicep, the bump of his elbow. She cuffed her hands lightly around his bony wrists. He could have broken her hold easily, she knew, because she'd been coaching his hand-to-hand moves. He didn't.

"Not for work," she said.

"Um. Yes."

"The girls at those don't let the men touch them."

"No. They remove their own clothing in an attempt to retain control over - "

"Ever stripped for someone?"

His voice squeaked. "Emily - I don't think - "

"It's for the case, honest." Which was why she didn't lean forward and lick the hollow of his throat. She dropped his wrists and put her hands to the waistband of his pants. He made a small noise in his throat, which she interpreted as _lower, please_. "Ever stripped for someone?"

"No."

"I have." She clenched her fists into his shirt, pulling lightly until the hem slid free of his waistband. "I've stripped and been stripped and stripped others - "

"As you're doing now - um, didn't we - "

"It's for the case," she told him sternly.

"I don't remember this part," he said as she worked his tie free. "In the case file." She undid the button just at the hollow of his throat. "It is remotely possible that I've forgotten."

She laughed low in her throat. "I'm working out a theory."

"By all means," he said politely. "Don't let me stop you." He'd settled his hands at the dip of her waist now. She felt the subtle pressure against her ribs with every breath. His lashes shadowed those knife-edged cheekbones as he looked down at her fingers, progressing down his front.

"Stripping someone else," she murmured, "is a powerful thing. Laying them bare. It's a kind of possession. A power play. Like the strip clubs, it turns your lover's body into your own plaything, except even more, because you're controlling the rate of exposure."

"Oh?" He slid his fingertips under the hem of her shirt and pulled it up, exposing abdomen and ribs and bra until it caught on her arms. She dropped her head back, smiling at him fractionally. He smiled back. She raised her arms so he could pull her shirt off entirely, feeling the stretch down into her back.

When her shirt dropped to the floor, her arms dropped too. "See?"

"You let me," he said softly, placing a finger on her breastbone and running it lightly down the center of her body to draw a little circle around her navel.

She shivered. "You could have forced me."

He looked vaguely offended.

"Not _you._ You in the general sense. The unsub you."

He hooked a finger under her bra strap, pulling it over the curve of her shoulder to rest on her arm. Funny how a thin strip of elastic and nylon, removed, made her shoulder and collarbone and the top of her breast feel that much more exposed.

"He didn't force them," Reid said. "He just killed them before stripping them."

"The ultimate passivity," she said.

And with his latest victims, flayed them, running a knife into their skin and then peeling it back. The poor lucky bastards had been dead for that, too, proof that their unsub wasn't after pain. If he had been, he would have kept them alive.

Not pain. Just power.

"The cuts were here," she said, tracing a line with her nails along his collarbones, "and down," down his sides. "The skin was removed in sheets."

They'd found those too, tossed by the bodies, rotting and fly-clustered in the sun. He didn't want the bodies, after a certain point, and he didn't want the skin. So what was left?

The stripping.

She slid her hands into the two halves of his shirt, pushing them apart like curtains to reveal his front. Collarbone, chest, ribs, stomach. All that skin, lovely and smooth, with a faint sprinkle of light-brown hair over his breastbone, continuing in a trail down his abdomen, around his navel, down further.

She touched the mole just under his nipple, making it crinkle. Under her other hand, his ribs jolted very slightly as he caught his breath.

She'd known he would. She knew this body; it was hers, it belonged to her. Fair trade, as hers belonged to him and he could make it do things that she never would have considered possible.

She pushed his shirt off his shoulders. It slid down until it caught and hung from his elbows.

"He peeled it back, carefully. Revealing the muscles."

"Pectoralis major," he said, watching her hand as it trailed down. "Serratus anterior. Latissimus dorsi. Rectus abdominus."

"The skin covered up the muscles," she said. "Like clothes covering skin."

He tilted his head. "He discards the bodies in an average of four hours. Three to six hours is the the time that rigor mortis sets into the muscles, although the removal of the skin may change that timeline."

"You think he manipulates the limbs?"

"To watch them move? While he masturbates?"

"Can't do that when they've stiffened up."

"No. No, you can't. Necrophilia often occurs with other paraphiliae. We noted the one similarity amongst our victims was low body fat and high muscle weight. Maybe our unsub fetishizes musculature."

"If that's true, we should arrest the entire audience of the Mr. Universe pageant."

Their eyes met.

"We had common jobs for necrophiliacs in the profile," Reid said. "But what if he has a job that feeds the fetish, instead? Like a strip club. Many of the girls dance as well as strip. Good opportunity to see the muscles in action."

"The lighting is pretty poor in those. And that's all about skin. But he doesn't care about the skin. What's under it, instead."

"What profession fetishizes musculature?"

"Plastic surgeon? Physical therapist?" She leaned back, thinking. She'd worked out with him before, in the body-toning sense as well as the giggle-and-slap-and-moan sense. She enjoyed it very much, watching him stretch before and after his swim. "Physical trainer? Do you think any of the victims attended the same gym?"

"Let's find out."

He tilted forward, resting his forehead against hers. "Right now?" His thumb traced patterns on her stomach and his arousal pressed into her hip.

She thought, _Hotch doesn't need to know_, then sighed. "Yes," she said.

He sighed too, knowing without discussion that they could push boundaries but not break them, because Hotch trusted them to be professional and controlled and save all their hot jungle sex for those times when they weren't actively working to keep people from being killed in nasty and imaginative ways. This, standing here stripping each other while their faces flushed and their breath came heavy, was pushing the boundaries so hard they creaked.

"I'll call Garcia," she said. "You . . ."

"Cold shower," he said gloomily.

She pushed away from him. "Don't remind about you and showers, please," she said. "I need one too."

As she talked to Garcia, and then got into the icy shower in her own hotel room, Emily reflected that their capacity for climbing inside an unsub's brain was wholly disturbing at times. Not that she understood completely.

After all, Reid's skin was awfully nice, too.

FINIS


End file.
